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Wednesday, September 17, 2008

What Gender Is Your Brain?

While surfing the Internet I came across a questionnaire that professed to have the ability to determine the gender of the brain. Of course you know that I simply could not resisttaking the test.

Your Brain is 33% Female, 67% Male

You have a total boy brain Logical and detailed, you tend to look at the facts And while your emotions do sway you sometimes... You never like to get feelings too involved

The "unhusband" scored:27% Female, 73% Male

The "unhusband" thinks I make a pretty hot guy...HAHA. What these ridiculous little tests rely on for accuracy are essentialist traits. Notice that because I was deemed logical and detailed, the quiz decided that I was male; therefore women are illogical and disorganized. The male thought processes are determined by reason and only the irritational female allows herself to be ruled by emotion.

Any thinking, independent autonomous woman would have been deemed male by this ridiculous test. This is just an asinine internet quiz, but I feel that it is very indicative of the ways in which we understand gender in this society.

Logic and reason are not a contradiction of my womanhood, rather they are a contradiction of how we have socially constructed femininity. Just as De Beauvoir theorizes, one is not borne a woman but becomes one. Our understanding of gender is what allows the perpetuati0n of the social hierarchy wherein males are continually privileged. My brain is female because I am a woman. Despite the fact that society has encoded my body with a problematic identity, rationality and independence are a part of my identity.

15 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Have your testosterone levels checked out and I bet dollars to donuts that they come up higher than average for your gender, age and BMI. There's a reason certain stereotypes persist -- it's because they're based in fact.

So I couldn't resist the test... I ended up being 40% female, 60% male. You're right... the questions are totally essentialist. Women are nurturing and empathetic, men don't care about relationships and are logical. Go figure.

What does this question,"Even if you aren't one yourself, you can understand how some people can be vegetarians," have to do with gender? Ah, maybe it's the word "understand." If you "understand" you must be a woman. Or, the desire for non-violence is being feminized.

I scored 27% Female, 73% Male. Whew. I thought I might have to give back my trans membership card.

A couple years ago I asked my gyn to check my hormone levels. We discussed my trans identity and after a long Q&A about what I wanted to know and such he told me that hormone levels are not indicative of anything. A husky football player can have lower testosterone than sterotypical feminine woman. I wanted empirical proof. He told me to be who I knew I was because the body is way more complicated than that.

Ugh, I'm a woman and I've got a "33% female brain." The questions were dumb too... like are you more likely to talk about the news and sports or your friends and what they're doing. Because all guys talk about is sports and all girls chatter about is gossip? No gender stereotyping there.

I wouldn't take this too seriously. Somebody just looked up statistics for things that tend to vary by gender and turned them in to yes-or-no questions. It has some seriously bad misspellings in it. Like "imput" for crying out loud.

More interesting would be a discussion of the causes of those underlying source statistics.

@anon no one is really taking it seriously I called the test itself ridiculous in the blog post. It is the idea that we have essentialist gender traits that this conversation is really all about and how damaging they can be.

Your Brain is 73% Female, 27% MaleYour brain leans female. You think with your heart, not your head. Sweet and considerate, you are a giver. But you're tough enough not to let anyone take advantage of you!

I find it somewhat degrading that they define character traits such as being "sweet" or "considerate" as being exclusively feminine. That's such a limited and backwards definition of masculinity to imply that if I'm nice or caring, it's only because I have a female brain. Men can be nice guys!

Apparently, being able to marry for money if the person was a billionaire makes you more female on the quiz... That might be the most insulting one for in my opinion.I wonder what the correlation of scores to gender would be like with a random sampling of men and women (and others) taking the test.

I filled out the quiz once honestly (47% Female, 53% Male), then went back a few times to play around with the results. According to their opinions of "male" and "female" brains, marrying for money should really be a male choice, you'd think, since it's a more practical and less emotional reason than love. But hey, who needs logic when it comes to sexism?

If you answer in a stereotypically-female fashion, the quiz results praise you for being "emphatetic".

Intense Debate Comments

About Me

I am the mother of two darling little boys that fill my life with hope. They have inspired me to help raise awareness of the issues that plague this little blue planet.
If you are looking for a blog that is all about how wonderful and rosy this world is, turn right because this space will not be for you. I am a committed humanist. I believe in the value of people over commodities. I believe in the human right to food, clothing, shelter, and education. I am pacifist, anti-racist, WOC. My truth may not be your truth, but I intend to speak it nonetheless.
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